Comp plan consultants

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

By Ben Cannon

The upcoming revisions to Jackson Hole’s comprehensive plans at both the town and county levels – a major overhauling process now nearly underway – will require a formidable effort to call into crucial public dialogue the myriad voices and interests inevitably affected under the guiding text.

The current comp plan, adopted in 1994, has been eyed for revision for some time now, and both town and county hope to reshape it into something more cohesive while maintaining some of the basic elements that initially took over two years to hash out.
To help guide the governing bodies through the process of gathering public input from as wide a spectrum of Jackson Hole’s economic, environmental and cultural interests as possible – all while keeping the goal of desirable “character” in focus – the joint elective board awarded Clarion Associates the comp plan contracts earlier this year.

Clarion, a planning firm with two locations in Colorado as well as offices in Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Chapel Hill, N.C., first sat down with Jackson Hole electives in July, at which point they began interviewing so-called stakeholders – individuals and special interest representatives identified to lend their respective nuances of a community increasingly harder to typify.

Ben Herman, a Clarion vice president, has been with the company about 15 years. Herman, along with Clarion Principal Planner Lesli Kunkle and former Teton County Planning Director Bill Collins – considered an authority on the ’94 comp plan – will serve as the main delegation to help update, streamline and give muscle to the current plan, which will not be scrapped, electives say, but improved.

In the world of planning, as Herman sees it, the transformation rapidly altering much of the Mountain West is the only constant factor when it comes to surveying the needs for each community.

“There is no standard approach,” Herman said in a phone interview from his Ft. Collins office last week. “The question is what does each community need. We don’t put people into a template.”

Clarion has done consulting work in communities that resemble Jackson Hole – Steamboat, Colo., Pitken County and Sun Valley, Idaho – where there does exist a common trope of the booming woes of highly desirable places: affordable housing, transportation, and the want to preserve the less quantifiable aspects that color a community.

“There’s a lot of places I think we can draw from where we’ve worked before,” Herman said.

When asked about what vulnerabilities face Jackson Hole in particular, Herman answered, not surprisingly, the fleeting prospect for families and small business to plant stakes here.

“How do you retain a place as a real community and not just the shell of a community?” he asked. “Communities have struggled with that. You’re going to hang your hat where you live. It becomes a struggle to get people to volunteer: Who’s going to serve on committees, the PTA? That portion of the community kind of erodes.”

Teton County Commission Chairman Andy Schwartz is ready to begin the massive revision expected to occupy part of his time somewhere short of the next year, if all goes as planned.

“[Clarion Associates] are a very well qualified group of people,” Schwartz said, adding that the role of the two Clarion planners is to cull public input and synthesize it into ideas, while Collins is on hand for his “working understanding of the comp plan” and the contradictions that partially render it ineffective.

Herman expects to return to Jackson every other month until the job is done. He noted the fatigue of electives, staff and the public after lengthy major projects, often chock full of meetings and debate. And with a number of ongoing and burgeoning issues uncertainly moving forward without a more lucid document to help clarify what’s what, the comp plan revisions will not come too soon for a community that greatly values what it has trying to balance what it wants to be.

“The pressures are such that they need to move this plan forward,” Herman said. “This should have been done a while ago.”
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Comp plan consultants | Planet JH News Article: County News

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